Speed & Reliability

Faster & More Reliable Than The Competition… How?

On average our sites are significantly faster than the competition’s when comparing sites of similar size, amounts of media, and features. Evening leaving that out of the equation every single one of our sites — even the most bloated, media heavy, massive sites we host are fast enough to get a significant page rank bonus from Google based on their speed.

*Page updated with new information March 2012 – See Company Blog Post Here

Wicked Hardware

We dare you to ask any other developer what kind of hardware their websites are running on… we bet you’ll get to either watch a blank stare, or hear the snappy response as they list off some other company that does such a “great” job of managing their hosting for them (how do they know?!). We dare you to prod about what optimizations they make to their web server to make your websites load faster than the competition. We bet that with 99% of web developers, web designers, freelancers, and even experienced companies you will get generic responses like “We have a great web hosting company by the name of X.” or “We use the same web hosting company that hosts big company X.” or “We have our own dedicated server for our company.” (My favorite.)

The truth is that most web developers are not all that interested in investing the large amount of time & effort it takes to go to extremes to make their client website’s significantly faster than average by optimizing everything from the ground up from investing in expensive & high performance web hosting hardware, to top tier bandwidth and management, to extensive custom Apache & MySQL enhancements, to various other enhancements like redundant DNS & local DNS servers, & various caching solutions and content distribution networks to speed delivery of static content. As part of our commitment to being a well-rounded and complete “website solutions provider” we do ALL of those things… obsessively.

We step it up many notches past your average “put your website online with a shared host” and not only run our own dedicated server hardware, but also use exceptional & expensive hardware that’s considerably better than most commodity level hardware that’s used for website hosting. Our main front-end server currently has:

Wicked Configuration

We’re a bit obsessive about the speed of our websites, without compromising functionality like a great easy to use content management system, which is why we tweak our own hardware, set it up and monitor it ourselves constantly. We also leverage the power of giant content distribution networks powered by millions of dollars worth of hardware like Amazon’s S3 & Cloudfront services for our customers. This means extremely fast load times even when you travel half way around the world and pop your site’s address into the browser at the net-cafe. Our websites tend to be within 0.5s “load time” regardless of where you are.

Highly tweaked server with a setup similar to Facebook’s with front end SSD/Ramdisk caching & nearly instantaneous serving of all static content (details not public).

Reliability Features

Our main server is located in the Liquid Web Data Center in Lansing, MI . The facilities are staffed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The security was created by the designers of the federal reserve. They provide some of the highest level design and engineering features available in the world; surpassing uptime, security, cooling and power redundancy standards of most other hosting facilities.

For some clients we also use Zoneedit’s services for DNS as their DNS servers are consistently faster, and they have over 30 geographically unique servers so we can set your website’s nameservers close to your business’s headquarters for exceptionally fast look-ups by most of your traffic.

Other reliability features we offer;

Fully automated daily backups of our entire servers, including databases & all website files to a private server at another location.

Fail-over DNS service & redundant hosting for our clients that just cannot ever have their website go down: ZoneEdit Failover Service

Don’t Just Take Our Word For It – Test For Yourself

We extensively test and optimize every client website using these very tools, so you can expect us to be quite a bit faster on average than the competition — especially when comparing sites of similar size.

These tools occasionally have errors or can’t measure particular sites accurately, for these sites we rely on Google’s Pagespeed analysis in Google’s Webmaster-Tools, Yahoo’s Yslow plugin, and the subjective feel of the website – see how fast our sites are for yourself!

Lets be honest, we still fill our clients websites with nearly ridiculous heaps of higher-than-necessary-quality media and make them massively user-friendly and dynamic — running on-top of relatively slow & bloated (but extremely easy to use) content management systems. Starting from that high and uncompromising standard of design and usability; we do everything that is possible to make our sites fast. We just love the thought of our clients being able to sit down with another business owner and say “our website is faster, prettier, gets us more business,… and I can update it myself right now on this cell phone”.